1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a translation system based on patterns, and more particularly to a translation system based on patterns that are suitable for use by individual users as preprocessing for a general machine translation system that is difficult to customize.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is a matter of course that the accuracy of the translation system itself is of importance in putting machine translation to practical use. However, customization functions are no less important, since they make accommodation to the wording of an application easier.
In current machine translation technology, customization is mainly performed by additions to and changes in the terms in a dictionary and tuning of grammatical rules. However, a high level knowledge of linguistics and the system is required to modify the dictionary and the grammatical rules while maintaining the integrity of the entire system. In addition, if expressions unique to the customer do not fit the language model of the system, it is sometimes very difficult to add such expressions. Therefore, the case of customization is a key factor in putting machine translation into practical use. For example, customization may be required to translate some Japanese characters that have a pronunciation but not independent meaning in English. Only when these characters are combined with more than two characters do they represent a specific meaning.
One method to solve such problems in which the user prepares in advance translation sentence patterns unique to him or her, and in which translation sentences are generated by collating these patterns as preprocessing of translation is disclosed in, for example, Published Unexamined Patent Applications 2-32467 and 3-116272. These translation sentence patterns are arranged to be able to be replaced with "numerical values" and specific terms in an original sentence as variables.
However, this method is in principle one in which the translation sentence patterns only correlate an original sentence and a translation sentence in a one-to-one relationship. To cover a wide range of expressions with this method, it is necessary to prepare a number of patterns and to take an extensive period of time for creating and retrieving the translation sentence patterns. This is not efficient.